November 12, 2011

Martin Landwehrmann from Germany sent in a ton of great build pictures of this BIG DIY LED Matrix and an English description on what André Zibell, Tobias Mc Fadden and Martin have been working on. By the pictures you can see that this creation wasn’t a simple task to put together but the results are great!

“I want to tell you about the project we have realized here in munich, germany. I have built a LED Matrix with 1470 Pixels from scratch. Most work was done with the help of many friends in my living room.

Each Pixel is a 32×32 mm² sized self desinged PCB with 6 PLCC6 RGB LEDs, a WS2801 IC and all the small parts you need. In total we’ve soldered 26460 pieces by hand. We’ve did most of the soldering in our pizza oven using the reflow method. The slodering paste was brought up using a template and a credit card. Afterwards all the parts were assembled by hand using tweezers.

The Pixels were assembled on on a self built 70×70 cm frame made of black coated 2×1 cm aluminum profile. The 4 wires (clock, data,vcc,gnd) between each pixel are hidden under a black heat shrink tube. At the end each of the 30 70x70cm frames got a small connector panel with two (in,out) neutik speakon connectors, a fuse for the current and bus driver for clock and data.

The power consumption of each frame is 3A, 24V. For controlling the matrix we are using an Onumen Live-Controller 2100 but we are working on a solution to control it by ARTnet Most Work was done by André Zibell, Tobias Mc Fadden and me.”